The present invention relates to systems, methods and apparatus to provide for improvements on network-based sweepstakes promotions.
Sweepstakes and contests have been around since at least the 15th century. The term “sweepstakes” was a reference to a common medieval game where everyone placed in a “stake” and the winner “swept,” or won, all the stakes. The term “sweepstakes” has become a generic term for any activity in which one or more winners win a prize. The advent of the modern sweepstakes contest occurred during the 1950's.
Advertisers began to realize that a free prize could play a major role in advertising for a specific consumer product. By offering a chance to win a prize associated with a product for free, customers became more interested in that particular product. They would also be more likely to remember and purchase the product in the future. It was discovered that sweepstakes were often cheaper than running a traditional advertising campaign. In the early days of modern sweepstakes a customer would often purchase more products in order to submit entries to “win”.
The terms sweepstakes and contest are often used interchangeably. There is however a technical difference. Sweepstakes are prize giveaways where the winners are chosen by some random variable. Contests are giveaways that have some element of merit or skill such as the best recipe for apple pie or the most beautiful photograph. Another key differentiator between sweepstakes and contests is the fact that to enter a sweepstakes a person does not have to purchase a product by law; where as in a contest it is legal to charge a contestant a fee, due to the fact that there is some element of merit or skill.
Modern sweepstakes law requires that a “no purchase necessary” clause must be in place to enter or win. Most sweepstakes do require a contestant to send in by mail a coupon or post card to enter the sweepstakes. It is usually the case that a contestant can enter as many times as they like within the time limit for entry. The mailed entries require the sweepstakes provider to perform labor intensive manual processing of the entries.
Typically the entries are entered into a computer database. The database information is considered quite valuable in that the contestant entries represent potential customers for future direct marketing of consumer products that the contestant might be interested in.
Key to making the “playing field” level for all contestants is the requirement that some document must be sent by mail to a central processing center to enter the sweepstakes contest. While it is possible for a contestant to computer generate multiple paper entries, it does become labor intensive and expensive for the contestant to do so in that each entry must still bear a post office legal stamp and be manually mailed.
For the sweepstakes provider (alternatively referred to as administrator) the manual processing of sweepstakes entries represents a major bottleneck and expense for providing a sweepstakes contest. The lack of uniformity of the entries (some may be hand written) requires human interpretation which often times leads to entry errors. Manual data entry is also time consuming, and therefore requires a large staff of keyboard entry personnel.
Some form of automation that minimizes the manual processing of contestant information for data base entry would make a sweepstakes promotion much more cost effective. The automation solution should also incorporate a method of making the entries uniform and machine readable.
FIG. 1 is an example of an actual sweepstakes as found in the prior art. It should be noted that the sweepstakes requires manual processing for both the contestant and the sweepstakes processing center.